Barrnon Limited Integrated Sort and Segregate Solution

In our first SBRI competition entry, Barrnon designed and submitted a robotic solution called BIDS (the Barrnon Integrated Decommissioning System). It can be used to characterize and reduce the size of radioactive assets -- that need decommissioning.

The company's new robotic venture is called BLISSS (Barrnon Limited Integrated Sort and Segregate System), building on this previous work. It is a system capable of autonomously identifying, characterizing, picking and placing various debris resulting from decommissioning. BLISSS brings together innovative vision, sensing, machine learning, robotic control, algorithms and formal methods to sort, segregate and verify debris for waste export -- all in accordance with nuclear waste category methodologies.

BLISSS is revolutionary in that it can replicate, and radically improve on, the capabilities of a human worker during decommissioning - eliminating the need for human operatives in the hazardous environment to sort and segregate waste. The technology allows an object to be recognized, characterized in terms of substance and radioactivity, verified, manipulated and placed autonomously; also the system is protected by formal methods - a mathematical proof that the system is doing what is required and can _NEVER_ do otherwise, eliminating the uncertainty of augmented intelligence and human error.

The system will also increase efficiency and effectiveness:

* at the work-face - BLISSS doesn't get fatigued, doesn't get bored, doesn't get life threatening injuries, doesn't need to change out PPE, doesn't have a human dose limitation and can work at the pace brought by robotics and machine learning 24/7\.
* due to lack of rework - BLISS does not make human errors, it is as predictable as 1+1=2 due to formal method mathematics.
* due to record keeping - all digital, all accurate, all compiled, all verified, always.
* due to algorithm derived optimized packing - the system scans the items for form factor and surface area and packs the items taking into consideration Waste Acceptance Criteria.

BLISSS is not platform specific. The BIDS platform is flexible and is specifically designed for multiple tool, multiple sensor compatibility, plug and play. However the capability is brought by integrating machine vision, sensing, machine learning and mathematical verification with hardware specifically developed for nuclear cell decommissioning. BLISSS is agnostic to platform. It is a suite of programs and algorithms that can be utilized by typical decommissioning hardware as it communicates via industry standard protocols and languages.